How we got the measure of a Berliner

To show his solidarity with the people of divided Berlin in 1961, President Kennedy claimed that he, too, was a citizen of Berlin. "I am a Berliner," he said. "Ich bin ein Berliner." He didn't know that in German he was saying, "I'm a jam doughnut" (in Frankfurt he would not have said that he was a Frankfurter). He could also have been laying claim to being a newspaper size.

The Berliner format has been around a long time, one of the three in continental Europe when vast rotary presses were built for printing newspapers be fore the first world war. The alternatives to the Berliner - or more correctly, the Berlin - were the so-called North German and the French sizes.

Presses were built to a newspaper's specific needs. The format was important, not just to the finished product, but to its production. The bigger the format the slower the printing. There is a limit to the tremendous speed which a long reel of paper can snake through the press without tearing.

The Guardian's printed area is now 287x443mm and the paper's page size 315x470mm. Ironically, Berliners have every size except a Berliner: their papers are less standardized than their doughnuts. Die Welt and Berliner Morgenpost share a size with the other German national broadsheets - 374x528mm; the evening Berliner Abendblatt is smaller, but still big. The Berlin Daily Sun has never heard of the Berliner format. But that's not surprising. It's published in Berlin, New Hampshire.

There are Berliners elsewhere, though. Barcelona's La Vanguardia and La Repubblica, which is published in Rome, both use the format. The 40,000 daily copies of the Guardian international edition will be printed on presses in Paris, Marseilles, Frankfurt and Madrid.

Berlin was the home of the German Standards Committee which established the paper sizes we use now - A4 and so on. Their proportion, recommended by the Nobel prize-winning chemist Wilhelm Ostwald in the early 1900s, is a rectangle which, when folded in half across its length, retains the same proportion, and forms the next smallest size. In halving their size, the broadsheets which have become tabloids have taken on new proportions.

And there is a three-dimensional aspect to the newspaper. The folded newsprint becomes an object. Apart from taking the ink without its spreading or showing through, the sheet of dried woodpulp and recyled fibre must flex and fold to make up something substantial at the newsagent, in the letterbox, in the hand.

Because Berliners - that is, the people of Berlin - read on buses, they have become experts in folding their broadsheets to read a few columns at a time. Yet, with their shrinking size, European papers have lost some of their versatility. Folded under the arm, the newspaper added sophistication to the silhouette of the urban male. Sticking from the pocket it was a sign of seriousness, on the dog track and on the way to the Bourse. They are now less comfortable to snooze under and much less practical for concealment at the breakfast table. But the format does not threaten its use as a signal: "I shall be wearing a black T-shirt and carrying a copy of the Guardian".

The same size as the reduced Le Monde and the Neue Z¿rcher Zeitung, the Berliner format will be handier than the old Guardian. And it won't be mistaken for a doughnut.

· Richard Hollis is a graphic designer and author of the forthcoming book, Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style 1925- 1965, published by Laurence King